(FORTUNE Magazine) – In a city where it's easy to lose your bearings, the Twin Towers were a compass point. You could always find your way by searching for the two 110-story edifices looming above the skyline. They told us where we were. Now that the World Trade Center has been reduced to rubble, New York City feels smaller. So do we. That's why no matter how many times we see the television footage of the towers crumbling, we still can't believe they could really be gone. When we picture the skyline in our minds, there they are.

We didn't always identify so strongly with the World Trade Center. In fact, when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey completed the towers in the early 1970s, they were almost universally reviled. Environmentalists charged that it would cost a fortune to light the 9.5-million-square-foot complex. Television stations complained that the buildings interfered with their broadcast signals. Steel manufacturers called the project anti-American because the builders had imported 50,000 tons of steel--a quarter of what was needed--from Japan. Aesthetes thought the towers appallingly banal. "There is a fascination with the towers' ugliness," a Washington Post architecture critic wrote in 1973. "Man's tallest buildings to date defy their surroundings, man's most wondrous, skyscraping community. The 110-story Brobdingnagian shafts stand with blunt, graceless arrogance at the western edge of Manhattan island, seeming to tilt that wonder with overbearing size and hubris."

The most serious indictment of the World Trade Center was simply that it was a spectacular waste of government money. The five-building complex, completed in 1977, was erected at the urging of Financial District boosters like Chase Manhattan's David Rockefeller, who, seeing big companies like Mobil decamp uptown, feared lower Manhattan would lose its status as the financial heart of the nation. The Port Authority envisioned the World Trade Center to be exactly what the name suggested: a haven for shipping firms, importer-exporters, and foreign government officials who did business in the region. Those kinds of businesses, it turned out, couldn't afford the rents, so the Port Authority went after financial firms, emptying more offices in Wall Street's canyons.

To most New Yorkers, though, it didn't matter who paid the rents in the World Trade Center. What mattered was its presence. The towers' vertical arrogance had become part of the way we perceived our world. We no longer cared if they weren't as stylish as the Chrysler Building or the Woolworth Building; they defined the New York skyline. Seeing the twin towers made us feel secure. They reminded us that we weren't just anywhere: We inhabited America's richest city, the engine of its economic growth, a city that would not just build the world's tallest building (which the trade center was, briefly), but build two of them. It's not surprising, then, that Mikhail Gorbachev made the World Trade Center's observation deck one of the first stops after a summit meeting with President Reagan in 1988. Nor should it be surprising that Chinese immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S. clutched postcards of the Twin Towers during their months-long journey in the hold of a rusted cargo ship. In their search for American prosperity, they chose this landmark to guide them.

So is it any wonder we can't fathom the towers' sudden disappearance? Even after a terrorist exploded a car bomb in a garage beneath the World Trade Center in 1993 and hundreds were injured, we went right back inside. The towers stood, even prospered. New York City's economy improved, and the World Trade Center, once considered a white elephant, became one of the most sought-after addresses in Manhattan. The Port Authority decided it didn't belong in the real estate business and this year leased it to a group of investors led by Larry Silverstein, a likable developer with a reputation as a straight-shooter. He controlled the city's tallest buildings, and even his fiercest competitors wished him well. That's how right it all seemed.

Then two jetliners appeared in the sky on Sept. 11, and everything turned horribly wrong. There's no way to escape the tragedy of that morning. Most of us who live in and around the city are not many degrees removed from people buried under the ruins of the World Trade Center. And as we await the final death toll, we're not sure where we are any longer. When we look up into the sky of lower Manhattan, there are no signposts.

--Devin Leonard

FEEDBACK: dleonard@fortunemail.com